Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume01Issue1

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Introduction
Contents

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the Canadian Roads WikiProject Newsletter, a quarterly publication of news, statistics, featured content and information regarding the project and what it is creating. The Canadian Roads WikiProject is an amalgamation of what has been largely to this date a dispersed group of editors working on various corners of the nation. Without any central organization, the project has largely gone unmonitored and each editor has developed his or her own style and technique. A lot has changed in the past several weeks as we try to re-fire the engines and climb out of the muskeg.

The Canada Roads WikiProject banner has been recreated and expanded upon, and rolled out across every province. The new banner organizes roads by province and whether or not they form a part of the Trans-Canada Highway, in addition to providing several informative notices and categories to aid in cleaning up articles. The project pages, meanwhile, will receive a much-needed overhaul in the coming weeks. A new assessment table is also available to provide a comparison (and a little friendly competition) between provinces.

I hope to see you in the editing field; we've got a lot of work to do and a long way to go.

Where the Streets Have No Name
In February, the Canada Roads Wikiproject was forked, and a new Canada Streets Wikiproject created. The new project is tasked with the multitude of articles covering city streets. The reason for this split was twofold: First, and foremost, is the differences in content. Street articles focus more on the business and transit along the route, while highway articles are refined to describing the route and the history of it. Secondly was to allow the creation of a second set of standards which are more suited to the content of those articles. This resulted in the project loosing approximately 600 articles.

Escaping Copyright
One of the most frequent issues to crop up around highways in Canada is the use of the copyrighted accentuations that adorn them, which for the most part are subject to crown copyright. This becomes an issue with shield designs copyright by provincial legislation or for shields designed more recently than 1961, as these shields cannot be used outside of the infobox on the article for that highway. Much work has gone into remedying these situations by designing simplified versions of those designs which aren't subject to copyright, but still appear to be the correct design when shrunk into an icon. The original design should still be used for the main image of the infobox on the article on that road.

Most recently, Denelson83 has recreated the British Columbia Route Shields. Svgalbertian also created new Saskatchewan shields in December.

Ontario
Written by Floydian

In Ontario great progress has been made in the past 12 months. The subproject is currently engaged in a stub-removal drive, with the aim of removing every stub article by the end of 2011. The drive began in early January with approximately 389 stubs to remove. In February, with the splitting of the Streets project, approximately 100 stubs were removed from Ontario; as a result the original stub count was reduced to 289 to accomodate this adjustment. As of May 1, there are 137 remaining stubs, which means that the subproject is 52.6% complete its goal. By the end of this stub drive, I will have personally looked over every single article under the scope of the subproject.

In addition to the stub-removal drive, plenty of effort is ongoing into upgrading each 400-series highway article to a minimum of B-class. The next goal will likely be to upgrade these to Good Article status.

A special thanks to users Pepper, Haljackey, Alaney2k and Johnny Au, all four of whom have made great contributions to the project during its reformation year.